So when you’re nervous, you count?” “Not just when I’m nervous,” I said. “It’s… all the time. I count the seconds during pauses in conversations. I count the minutes when I’m waiting on something. Sometimes, when I’m kind of panic...
Her endeavor was misguided and wrong and maybe plain crazy, akin to someone waking up one day and deciding he’s going to scale Kilimanjaro because he can’t stop imagining the view from the top, the picture so arresting and beautiful that it too s...
When the maker's (or fixer's) activity is immediately situated within a community of use, it can be enlivened by this kind of direct perception. Then the social character of his work isn't separate from its internal or "engineering" standards; the wo...
Enlightenment is a paradoxical phenomenon. You need to be commited to become enlightenment, and to do whatever is necessary to make it happen. But at the same time you can not force enlightenment to happen by sheer will. It is like the situation with...
A foolish German had said that man thought in words. It was totally false; a pernicious doctrine; the thoughts flashed into being in a hundred simultaneous forms, with a thousand associations, and the speaking mind selected one, forming it grossly in...
In a situation of manipulation, the Left is almost always tempted by a “quick return to power,” forgets the necessity of joining with the oppressed to forge an organization, and strays into an impossible “dialogue” with the dominant elites. I...
It's a false premise to say that most monogamous people have chosen monogamy. Most people belong to the religion they were raised in...because that's what's familiar. That's the milieu they grew up in, and, for better or worse, they're just continuin...
Why? Why does what was beautiful suddenly shatter in hindsight because it concealed dark truths? Why does the memory of years of happy marriage turn to gall when our partner is revealed to have had a lover all those years? Because such a situation ma...
I have breathed my way through so many people I felt wronged by; through so many situations I couldn't change. Sometimes while doing this I have breathed in acceptance and breathed out love. Sometimes I've breathed in gratitude and out forgiveness. S...
I knew he was unreliable, but he was fun to be with. He was a child’s ideal companion, full of surprises and happy animal energy. He enjoyed food and drink. He liked to try new things. He brought home coconuts, papayas, mangoes, and urged them on o...
My borrowed power insists that negative situations, too, assist me on the path to greater becoming. It's never about the circumstance(s); these are surface level 'symptomatics'. How we deal with the energy it brings, however, is telling of how we cho...
There’s very little that worrying can do to help our situations. Worrying is like running on a treadmill…it gives us an opportunity to sweat but gets us absolutely nowhere. Worrying skews our reality, suppresses the immune system, promotes corona...
There are two types of empathy: the positive empathy and the negative empathy. When we are fully carried away by the unaware activities of the mirror neurons, we are under the trap of negative empathy. The negative empathy generates attachments. Out ...
This doll-guy situation is an extreme of what I deal with in everyday life, where men believe that what they want I want, and they project that on to me and then blame me, curse me, when I don’t respond the way they’ve fantasized, like it’s som...
While the opportunity to improve yourself and your situation is a great thing, our striving to build perfect lives seems to have morphed into perfectionism so focused on itself that we forget about others in the world. We work so hard to build the ul...
There are no telegraphs on Tralfamadore. But you're right: each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message-- describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn't any particular relationship ...
There'a a phrase, "the elephant in the living room", which purports to describe what it's like to live with a drug addict, an alcoholic, an abuser. People outside such relationships will sometimes ask, "How could you let such a business go on for so ...
It’s very important that people take back their minds and that people analyse our dilemma in the context of the entire human story from the descent onto the grassland to our potential destiny as citizens of the galaxy and the universe. We are at a ...
This is the result of our choices. Literacy and knowing how to respect oneself beyond being just a marketing tool that is sold every lousy idea and impression of society could easily erase much of the crime. Ideas make us who we are and a person bank...
Nature, ... in order to carry out the marvelous operations [that occur] in animals and plants has been pleased to construct their organized bodies with a very large number of machines, which are of necessity made up of extremely minute parts so shape...
